The discussion revolves around disabling the automatic unpinning of topics in Discourse. Users dictoon and sam highlight confusion over this feature, which unpins topics after they are read. zogstrip explains that a new per-user setting was added to disable automatic unpinning, which was previously a site-wide option. dictoon initially questioned the existence of two settings but clarified after learning it’s a per-user preference. tophee asks about the timing of unpinning, and zogstrip confirms it occurs only when the user reaches the end of the topic. tophee suggests adding a timer before unpinning for better usability.
Not sure to understand why there are two settings (Automatically unpin and Automatically unpin by default) since there are no per-topic unpin setting… Yet?
The “automatically_unpin_topics” setting is used to globally enable/disable the feature while the “default_topics_automatic_unpin” setting is used to set the default user preference.
You might want to have the feature enabled globally but defaulted to off for your new users.
Do I understand things correctly that when a pinned topic only has a single post, the topic gets unpinned as soon as that post is displayed for the user? Or only after it has been displayed for a certain amount of time?
I think it would be good if the automatic unpinning would only be triggered if a topic has been viewed for a certain amount of time. Reason: if you pin a topic, the idea is to make sure that people read it. If it is only one post (perhaps because it is a closed announcement) and people only briefly look at it, you might want to keep it pinned for them until they take a closer look.
Okay, fine. Then what do you think about adding a timer before it is unpinned? The timer will be irrelevant for longer topics but would be useful for one-post topics.